Diabetic Retinopathy Caused by Nerve Damage, According to New Study

We’re not strangers to the topic of diabetic retinopathy here at RYV. We’ve devoted a lot of time to the subject on this blog because it is the most common eye disease among diabetics. If caught early, it may be possible to prevent it, which is why we work hard to bring you the facts.

Ask any physician what causes diabetic retinopathy and they’ll say, “Blood vessel damage”. Leader of the study Rithwick Rajagopal suggests otherwise. According to his findings, the disease develops long before the vessels get damaged and could be caused by nerve damage instead.

What is Diabetic Retinopathy?

Diabetic retinopathy is a diabetes-related disease that affects the blood vessels in the eyes. The disease does not affect every diabetic but those with constant high blood sugar are more likely to develop it.

The disease is sneaky. Symptoms oftentimes only appear in the later stages, meaning there is no chance at preventing it by then. The typical treatment of diabetic retinopathy is to use medication to control the blood vessel damage and prevent them from leaking more into the retina.

Symptoms of the disease include vision loss, blurred vision, floaters, and dark spots in your vision. Diabetic retinopathy normally affects both eyes. If you are diabetic and experience any of these symptoms, visit your eye doctor for a comprehensive eye exam.

Someone with diabetic retinopathy will experience spotted vision, due to blood vessel leakage in the retina. Parts of their central vision will diminish. Eventually, it can lead to complete loss of vision.

Experts recommend diabetics get yearly eye exams to detect the disease early if it ever develops. Some doctors will recommend more frequent eye exams, especially if diabetic retinopathy is already present. If caught early, your doctor will help monitor the disease and help prevent it from getting worse.

Diabetic retinopathy is thought to be brought on by too much sugar in the blood. When this happens, the blood vessels in the eye become clogged. Your body’s natural counter action to blocked vessels is to produce more. However, these new blood vessels grow deformed and begin to leak into the eye.

The Study: Diabetic Retinopathy in Mice

Lead researcher Rithwick Rajagopal was unimpressed with the current treatment of diabetes, which was ultimately his motive for digging a little deeper when it came to detecting diabetic retinopathy. What he found was that the blood vessels may not be entirely to blame for the cause of the disease.

As mentioned, it is possible to control diabetic retinopathy with drugs, if caught early. The medication limits the formation of new blood vessels. This works to prevent the disease from graduating to the later stages, but is by no means a cure.

What Rajagopal has discovered could potentially open doors to finding a cure. He suggests that the cause of diabetic retinopathy is nerve damage, and that bleeding and leaking vessels are only a symptom of the disease.

The study began with mice being fed a high fat diet to induce diabetes and later, diabetic retinopathy. At the sixth month mark, these mice began to display nerve damage in the retina. However, they showed no sign of blood vessel damage.

The researches examine the mice’s eyes once more a full year after the start of the study. This time they had definite signs of blood vessel damage. According to Rajagopal, the disease progressed so slowly that they were able to thoroughly track the stages of the disease.

The study concluded that the nerve damage in the retina caused problems in the eye much earlier than the damage blood vessels did. This suggests that the true cause of diabetic retinopathy is not blood vessel damage, but nerve damage instead.

What Comes Next

What comes next in this saga is developing various therapies and medication to treat nerve damage in the eye before the blood vessel damage begins. However, Rajagopal explains that the long held belief that diabetic retinopathy is a blood vessel disease will not be easy to shake.

We need more human trials and further studies to support Rajagopal’s argument. This is not always such an easy task, especially when attempting to find willing participants. Researchers need to determine that diabetic retinopathy follows the same path in human eyes as in mice before treatments can be found.

Many people find that today’s medication adequately treats diabetic retinopathy (if it’s caught early enough). But, finding a way to detect the nerve damage could potentially lead to complete prevention of the disease.

Prevent Diabetic Retinopathy

For the time being, the only way to treat diabetic retinopathy is to prevent the disease from developing and from progressing if it has already developed in the eye. One way to prevent this disease is to keep your diabetes in check.

This seems like an obvious piece of advice, however many diabetics often have high blood sugar levels due to lack of monitoring. Keeping that in check will help to prevent nerve damage and blood vessel damage. Eating a balanced diet and cutting out overly sugary food could also help with disease prevention.

The hope for the future is that this new discovery can help diabetics and doctors alike to better understand this sight-threatening disease. Diabetes is a tough disease to handle without the added stress of diabetic retinopathy.

Hopefully new techniques for treating nerve damage in the retina are on the horizon. In the meantime, make your life a little easier by getting a comprehensive eye exam annually.

About Orlin Sorensen

My vision started to get blurry as a young teenager. Soon I was wearing glasses for just about everything. This was a hard blow for me because I had always dreamed of becoming a U.S. Navy fighter pilot which required perfect vision without glasses or surgery. But I wasn't ready to give up on my dreams, so I looked into every possible alternative which led me to eye exercises. Through daily vision training and eye exercises, I improved my vision from 20/85 to 20/20 and passed the Navy's visual acuity test. In fact Men's Health declared this one of the "Greatest Comebacks of All Time!" Now, I'm sharing exactly how I did it with the program that helped me so people like you can improve your vision safely and naturally, without glasses, contacts or laser surgery.

The confusion about fat arises from the fact that many doctors, scientists etc. (some of them in my view intentionally) refrain from stating which kind of fat it was! Namely, if oxidized, non organic, full of hormones and cheicals, and high in pro-inflammatory omega 6, than fat is bad. It is also carcinogenic and it ages people quickly and causes degenerative diseases of civilization . including cancer. Especially if it has on top of it also been packed in plastic bottles that leach additional chemicals in these PUFA oils.

If however the fat is natural, clean, organic, non-compromised, non-processed (like cold pressed oils) and is stable – like saturated fats – or at least protected from oxidation (in case of non-saturated fats (i.e. liquid fats) this means that they must not be heated, then this fat is one of the healthiest things you can eat. No wonder we had been eating those fats for about 3 million years or so.

Saturated fat is uber healthy if it is not poisoned (with antibiotics, growth hormones, estrogens like soy that are used to make the animals fat(ter), and please let us not forget that pesticides are estrogens, too). So it is very useful to some industries to make people confused and take the knowledge about healthy eating away from then. Because people will then buy more prescription drugs, OTC drugs, dietetic products, fat burning products and even supplements. And Big Agra will sell more cheap and unhealthy grains and stuff like that. Beacause if people turn away from fats and protein stas the same, what else can they eat but health destroying carbs of the worst kind …

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